Lost in the Customhouse

In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society.From Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson to Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser, Loving finds the American literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the author's real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative. Loving celebrates, enjoys, and experiences these awakened and reborn writers as he challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately “cultural work.” In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbag--the American ego--and passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside their culture than within it.

Contents

Prologue

The American Renaissance is defined here as commencing with the magnum opus of Washington Irving and extending to the first (and best) novel of Theodore Dreiser in 1900. I have given special attention to the word "Renaissance" as it denotes rebirth and connotes
re-awakening.

Acknowledgments

THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE : PART ONE

1. Irvings Paradigm

Probably the most significant and yet paradoxical fact about American literature is that it begins in the middle of its official history and in the work of a dreamer, Washington Irving. Nothing before him in the brooding spirit of the Colonial writers or in the rational wisdom of the eighteenth century quite anticipates The Sketch Book (1819-20) as America's first acknowledged contribution to world literature as well...

2. Hawthorne's Awakening in the Customhouse

It is appropriate that the author of America's next "Sketch Book" is "A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR" another dreamer who loses his head in the abyss of the imagination. In recounting the story of his removal from the Salem Custom House, Nathaniel...

4. Poe's Voyage from Edgartown

In Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym (1838) it is difficult to know whether the tale has a proper ending. Indeed, its title reflects palindromically back on its author, whose three-part name is euphonically similar to the name of his character. The "Note" at the close announces "the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym"...

5. Emerson's Beautiful Estate

Proper endings aside, Ralph Waldo Emerson is reported to have uttered on his deathbed, "Oh that beautiful boy." 1 The allusion, it is generally assumed, was to the poet's five-year-old son Waldo, who had succumbed to scarlet fever forty years earlier. Clearly, the child's early and swift departure helped to inspire "Experience," which, unlike the earlier (and later) essays...

6. Thoreau's Quarrel with Emerson

On his deathbed Henry David Thoreau is alleged to
have said that he had no quarrel with God. The story is familiar to students of Thoreau, often quoted by professors to characterize Thoreau's sense of humor...

12. Dreiser's Novel About a Nun

In this final chapter on authorship in the American Renaissance as extended to 1900 and to Sister Carrie, I want to begin with two assertions that run counter to the critical consensus about Theodore Dreiser's work.

Epilogue

During the fall of 1989, soon after drafting the Dickinson chapter in this book, I had the opportunity of teaching as a Fulbright lecturer at La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Universite de Paris-III) and-because Walt...

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